Will Memory Become The Prime Storage Medium?

I keep hearing the words “In Memory Database,” and that’s not surprising, because there are now more in-memory database products than there used to be, and it’s beginning to look like some of these products will become mainstream.

Should we care?

I would have thought so, although perhaps we should care more about the overall impact on software architecture than the emergence of a new class of database product.

The simple fact is this: memory access is 100,000 times faster than disk access and that disparity in speed has been getting bigger over the years. The situation is that cpu power, bus speeds and memory speeds have been increasing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling every 18 months. By contrast disk read speeds have been improving linearly rather than exponentially. Consequently, the disparity between the two latencies has been increasing and continues to do so.

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